TULCA 2016 Events (weekend 2) – performance, readings, music and much more

Weekend Two Schedule of Events

Thursday 10th November | 6pmPerformanceGalway Arts Centre

In the context of his TULCA installation Boxes, Martin Sharry has produced a new live work, What’s The Story?, to be read by an actor three times during the festival – Thursday 10th, Thursday 17th and Saturday 19th. Martin’s text roams over the vagaries of life, translation and punding.

Acclaimed London author Tony White reads short stories including ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ – ‘Super dry, dark and funny. Glasnost for UK cops’ (Tim Etchells). At once a satirical performance, a protest and an act of radical remembrance, ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ proposes a shocking new use for the high-rise tower of Holborn Police Station in central London. Tony will also be reading from the 1999 ‘avant pulp’ novel Charlieunclenorfolktango, and a 2014 work ‘High-Lands’, performed here for the first time with live musical accompaniment from New Pope.

New Pope is a critically acclaimed songwriter dealing in melodic dream pop, and sometimes folk. Onstage he is joined by Colm Bohan (drums) and Stephen Connolly (organ/guitar) to create an immersive musical experience.

Followed with a screening of Alan Phelan’s 2012 short Include Me Out of the Partisans Manifesto, in which a suburban couple battle through the apparent obliteration of their shared experience as their DVD collection is painstakingly broken up and recycled. The film is based on a short story by White that was originally commissioned by the Irish Museum of Modern Art as a fictional response to Phelan’s art practice.

Saturday 12th November | 12 – 5pmLaunch eventThe Mechanics’ Institute

Art / Not Art (Dobz O’Brien and Fergal Gaynor) will launch their new project, the Society for the Conservation of Politics and Public Space (SCPPS). The Society aims to investigate and intervene in the current shrinkage of public space, and confusion regarding the nature of politics. It will do this from a position of tension between art and politics, prior to the engagement of any ideology.

Nothing can be assumed of its programme or how it will choose to organise itself. Its chief concern will be with the conditions of existence of art and politics, which overlap in the space of appearance, that is, in public space.

O’Brien and Gaynor will be present at the Institute for the day, to answer queries, and to assist readers at the SCPPS Library, a collection of texts on art and politics, all readable in an afternoon, suggested by the Society’s Irish and international affiliates.

2pmPerformance | Michelle HannahOUTOFTHEBLU_,Galway Arts Centre

Michelle Hannah presents OUTOFTHEBLU_, a durational work formed from a sung vocal performance over a composed synth soundtrack, based on a lyrical, collaged appropriation of the Roxy Music song Out of The Blue, and Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘Dialogo della Moda e della Morte’ (‘A Dialogue between Fashion and Death’). Leopardi’s text reveals the relationship between consumerism, morality and the deathly aesthetics of the pursuit of the ‘individual’.

The audience are free to come and go during the performance.

5pmPublic Lecture | Angus CameronCapital CityThe Mechanics’ Institute

Writer and lecturer Angus Cameron presents Capital City. All too often our understanding of the city lacks memory. The frenetic, forward-looking, excitement of the city makes it easy to forget the antiquity and embeddedness of its practices. Even if we accept that the city is always a palimpsest, it is the upper layers that catch the eye and provide the impetus for engagement. This intervention will excavate the foundations of the ‘capital city’ – specifically the urban situation and disciplining of money, trade, metal, spatiality, spirituality and, above all, people that appear from the very start. The capital(ist) city is both firmly historical and thoroughly trans-historical. But it has a point of origin in a specific place, a specific time and a particular name – one that used to be synonymous with wealth and power: Potosí. Booking required